In the past week alone, he has held forth on a range of serious topics in interviews with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, CNN’s Candy Crowley, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, and Fox’s Greta Van Susteren and Alisyn Camerota. The transcripts tell the story. Being Trump apparently means being able to say about nearly everything, “It’s so easy.”
Trump is militaristic. His Libya policy is simple. Obama is “weak and ineffective,” there and elsewhere, he says. What would he do? “I would go in and take the oil. . . . I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” Otherwise, he would not go into Libya at all. As for the Libyans, “I’d give them plenty so they can live very happily,” he says.
He holds similar views on Iraq. Trump worries that once U.S. troops leave, as they are set to do by the end of the year, the Iranians will move in. What is his solution? “We stay there, and we take the oil,” he says. He is not happy that the United States has spent, in his estimation, $1.5 trillion on the Iraq war. “We could have rebuilt half the United States” with that money, he argues.
Stephanopoulos asked, “So, we steal an oil field?” Trump responded: “Excuse me. You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking — we’re reimbursing ourselves. And we reimburse all of our allies. And we give every family a million or $2 million or $3 million who lost a son or a daughter. And all of the wounded that are all over the streets of all of the cities and all of the country.”
Trump believes the United States has acted like a chump militarily. He longs for the times when empires acted like empires. “In the old days,” he told Crowley, “when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours. This country is a laughingstock throughout the world.”
Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates may believe it’s time to cut the defense budget, but Trump doesn’t. He wouldn’t touch it. “We need great defense,” he told Guthrie. “I guarantee you, of all the Republicans, I’m the strongest on defense.”
Unlike the feeble Obama, Trump says, he could bring down rising gasoline prices and force the Chinese to compete on an even playing field. As he says, “It’s so easy.”
A consummate dealmaker as a real estate developer, Trump declares he would bring those same skills to negotiating with the Chinese or OPEC nations. On the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, he says: “We don’t have anybody in Washington that calls OPEC and says, ‘Fellows, it’s time. It’s over. You’re not gonna do it anymore.’ ”
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